Solubility of paracetamol in ethanol by molecular dynamics using the extended Einstein crystal method and experiments
Name
2019JChemPhys-Solubility.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.09 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
61bf25bc4b4079c6c9b9fe280b58b0d2
Author(s)
Bellucci, Michael A.
Gobbo, Gianpaolo
Wijethunga, Tharanga K.
Ciccotti, Giovanni
Trout, Bernhardt L.
Date Issued
March 2019
Journal
The Journal of Chemical Physics
Publisher
AIP Publishing
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019 Author(s). Li and co-workers [Li et al., J. Chem. Phys. 146, 214110 (2017)] have recently proposed a methodology to compute the solubility of molecular compounds from first principles, using molecular dynamics simulations. We revise and further explore their methodology that was originally applied to naphthalene in water at low concentration. In particular, we compute the solubility of paracetamol in an ethanol solution at ambient conditions. For the simulations, we used a force field that we previously reparameterized to reproduce certain thermodynamic properties of paracetamol but not explicitly its solubility in ethanol. In addition, we have determined the experimental solubility by performing turbidity measurements using a Crystal16 over a range of temperatures. Our work serves a dual purpose: (i) methodologically, we clarify how to compute, with a relatively straightforward procedure, the solubility of molecular compounds and (ii) applying this procedure, we show that the solubility predicted by our force field (0.085 ± 0.014 in mole ratio) is in good agreement with the experimental value obtained from our experiments and those reported in the literature (average 0.0585 ± 0.004), considering typical deviations for predictions from first principle methods. The good agreement between the experimental and the calculated solubility also suggests that the method used to reparameterize the force field can be used as a general strategy to optimize force fields for simulations in solution.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5086706
